How Long Before We Get Beyond Middle-Aged-White-Guy Tickets?

Thu., Sept. 17, 1998

Doug Floyd Interactive Editor

In a national footnote to Tuesday’s election, former Rep. Geraldine Ferraro lost the Democratic primary in a U.S. Senate race and then announced her retirement from politics - as a candidate, at least.

As Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984, Ferraro was the first woman ever nominated as a major political party’s candidate for president or vice president. Fourteen years later, she’s still the only one.

Ronald Reagan’s victory that year was the most one-sided presidential election since 1936 but it would be a real stretch to blame that on Ferraro.

So how long is it likely to be before another woman, or a member of a racial minority group, is nominated on a Republican or Democratic presidential ticket again? How long before such a ticket wins?

Why the delays, by the way, and who would be the most plausible barrier-busting candidates?

It’s party time

Here’s a novel political idea: a non-partisan political party.

“Another Bull Moose Party with a Teddy Roosevelt would be a breath of clean, fresh air,” said James A. Nelson of Spokane.

Roosevelt, a one-term president, lost the 1912 Republican nomination to William Howard Taft and then ran as the candidate of the Progressive Party, popularly called the Bull Moose Party. Democrat Woodrow Wilson won easily but Roosevelt collected 88 electoral votes to Taft’s eight.

“If this third party would run on the platform of practicing nonpartisan politics, it would win by a landslide, or should I say a mudslide?” Nelson said.

Double standard for double vision

“If being too drunk to know what you’re doing is an excuse for the kid over at WSU, does that mean we need to let out of jail the people that have been so drunk they’ve caused car accidents and killed other people?” asks Nancy Ann Herring of Spokane.

The not-guilty-by-reason-of-inebriation theory was part of a defense lawyer’s argument on behalf of a WSU student who stood trial recently in conjunction with a campus riot last spring.

Herring, a newcomer from Walla Walla, is a little puzzled about how much personal responsibility such a theory demands of people.

“If you get yourself drunk, then you don’t have personal responsibility, and yet some persons (drunk drivers, for instance) can go to jail for years.”

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